Womacknursery.com has four or five each of the most common Tina and Victorinox knives, 4 & 8 mil tape in clear, green, Etc, as well as Parafilm, shears, rubber strips, and professional production stuf. Being a chemist I bought Parafilm M in a 225 ft by 4 in wide roll from Fischer Scientific many years ago. I cut it cross wise to a 4 in length and match the with to the diameter of the wood I'm wrapping. Since I graft mostly citrus, I use a lot of liquid chlorine bleach and therefore get most use from the stainless Victorinox blades. Sharpen on a hard or extra hard (fine grained) Arkansas novaculite stone. Stones are available at gun/knife shops or shows or RioGrande Jewelry supply Albuequrque. Super fine diamond and syn. corundum (Al2O3) can be be used but cheap ones either fail soon or are not smooth enough to get a razor edge. If you use a Tina carbon steel blade you can use silicon carbide stones available at your hardware store. Dont buy a sorry knife. Use single edge razor blades instead if you have to save $. For other savings You can cut plastic bags to strips and finish with masking tape. No tie needed. For rubber stripes, some people use heavy rubber bands. I use 8mil tape and stretch it instead. You may not need parafilm if you do something else to conserve moisture in the scion or bud wood. But it sure beats wax unless you really know wax.

Interesting topic Wanda and thanks for the instructions on how to carve out a pillar. I've usually just let them burn enough to make a well to hold a real tealight then messed around with a knife but your way sounds much neater. :-) I burn real tealights, votives, tapers, then pillars in that order of frequency but tealights the most. I have a bazillion tealight holders (ys finds) and feel they are safer than tapers with the cats. I like the beeswax or soya the best altho have a lifetime supply of paraffin ones but mostly use them outdoors in the summer. Ikea has the best quality paraffin tealights for the lowest price IMO and sell in bags of 100 for about $3 on sale ($4-something regular) and I've also bot them at YS's for even less. I do have some battery ones I got a few years ago for the RV (for safety) but wasn't impressed with the appearance of the flame altho I've been told they have improved so should give them a try again. I like the idea of remote control pillars as I have the same accessibility problem on my mantel. I'd like to use them as there are convection currents because of the stove and my beeswax tapers dripped on the silk poinsettias at Christmas.

busybee and bcb - I think you're probably right, my mantel is higher than most and there's not much room between it and the ceiling. I love the birch pillars and they're a much less expensive than the PB candlesticks. They'd probably give me the rustic look and also stand out better aganst the stone. bcb - thank you! They're real stone veneers. We just remodeled the fireplace and used the ledge rock to cover ugly cinderblocks. I think this is one of my favorite results from the remodel. We used the same ledge rock outside for exterior hardscape. It came in single pieces and took our stone mason FOREVER to install on the fireplace because we didn't want him to cut the ends like we did for the exterior. Our kitchen floor is basically the same slate but in 16" slate tiles. It has a lot of variation of color and hides dirt and brown lab hair very well!

I only came upon one library book that some inconsiderate reader had annotated in ink. It was so distracting that it spoiled my attempt to read and enjoy the book. In one of my rarest of moments, I brought it to the attention of the library staff and the book was promptly removed from their catalog. I fussed...to myself...for days, I was so annoyed. I simply couldn't accept the lack of respect for public property. I don't mind a pencil doodle here or there in a child's book if it has some character. I was scolded severely as a child for doing same but I remember how interested I was in the book and the character that I simply had to personalize the book. When I see minimal pencil contributions of that nature...it brings back a lot of memories. My whole world began in books and I can understand the exuberance of a child doing exactly what I did. But minimally...and never to a book that doesn't belong to the parties involved.